Inside, my duffel bag is open and all my clothing is scattered like guts across the floor. I catch Mia staring at a pair of my underwear—polka dots, a gift from my mom—and shoot her a dirty look.
“Is there a problem?” I say.
She opens her mouth, closes it again, and shakes her head.
I bend down and grab a fistful of clothing, shoving it back into my bag. Screw Mia and her little white sundress and big sunglasses that probably cost a hundred bucks and her kooky-looking tagalong best friend. My back aches from sleeping on the hard floor, and there’s a foul taste in my mouth. I need to brush my teeth.
Mia’s friend—Abby—is already wading into the junk that has accumulated over the years. She moves aside a large sheet of corrugated metal, barely clearing an old car battery. “You said the cops cleaned out the shed after the murder?”
The way she says murder so casually makes me wince. “Pretty much,” I say. “They were looking for proof that we’d been holed up doing devil worship and murdering cats.”
“Were you?” Abby asks. I scowl at her and she shrugs. “Well, someone’s obviously using it again,” she says, gesturing to the piles of old crap. “Who does the shed belong to?”
“Nobody,” Mia says. She’s still standing in the doorway, hugging herself. Her hair is pulled back in a high ponytail, as if all these years she’s just been on one long detour on her way back to the ballet studio. “I mean, this land is public. It belongs to the town.”
“I’m surprised the town didn’t tear it down,” Abby says. She turns sideways, squeezing between two big metal grilles, the kind that might come off a Dodge Challenger. “Considering what happened.”
“The cops didn’t think it was important,” Mia says quietly. “They didn’t believe us when we told them how the shed had . . . changed. They didn’t understand about Lovelorn.”
“That’s because we made the whole thing up,” I say again, for at least the third time in two days.
It was a game we used to play. Not an hour in the police station, and Mia rolled. The cop taking notes in her interview read me back the pages. She told them all about the original Lovelorn book and how angry we were when Summer wanted to stop playing.
But Brynn was the maddest.
I left Brynn alone with her. I don’t know what happened next. Ask Brynn.
“Maybe not,” Abby says brightly. I stare at her as she leans hard against a massive piece of ancient machinery that looks kind of like an upside-down mushroom. “It’s not all farm equipment, you know. It’s someone’s stuff. Maybe more than one person’s stuff. There’s an old DVD player in the corner, and a violin case. No violin, though. But there’s this.” She bends down kind of awkwardly, resting one hand on the wall for balance, and holds up something that looks like a narrow funnel.
“What is that?” I say.
“Mouthpiece,” she says. “For some kind of horn. Looks like a double French, but I’m not sure.” When I just look at her blankly, she smirks. She’s an excellent smirker—she must have practice. “My mom’s the band teacher at TLC. And check it out.” Abby passes me the mouthpiece, which is surprisingly heavy. A small laminated label, warped with age, has been plastered to its underside.
“‘Property of Lillian Harding,’” I read out loud. Then I hand it back. I’m losing patience for this little mystery theater. “So someone’s got a hoarding problem. What does it matter?”
“It probably doesn’t.” Abby has gone back to clearing crap away from the corner. “But this might.”
She pulls her cell phone out of her bag, swipes to her flashlight app, and angles it toward the floor. Blocked by several pieces of heavy equipment, that corner of the room is heavily shadowed, but Abby squats so we can see the ragged line of paint near the floor.
And see, too, that in one or two places the wallpaper underneath it—a pattern of rose bouquets—has started to show.
“The corners are always the hardest part,” Abby says, grinning.